I love Google Earth. I enjoy zooming around and looking at places I’ve been or places I’ve heard of and especially places I’ve lived. But today I learned that there’s a similar program for the Universe. That’s right, nebulae and solar systems, and planet surfaces. Fun stuff!! It’s called World Wide Telescope, and it’s a free download. And so, because it was free and very very cool, I downloaded it and zoomed around the universe for a while, peeking under Neptune and into the Milky Way, prodding Venus, and spinning Mars around a crazy axis.

I sure hope some student needs something like this sometime and asks me about it at the reference desk. That way I can count what I did for the last 20 minutes as work.

p.s. Contrary to it’s About page, I don’t think this counts as a Web 2.0 tool, no matter how cool and shiny. For one thing, it’s not on the web once you download the application and start zooming. But that’s just me picking nits.